Bathhouse 25

Last weekend, we made another “invisible” improvement.  As I’ve explained, this is a fairly old house by Washington standards (built in 1927), and it appears to have been entirely built by the owners at every stage of construction (including, obviously, the currently-ongoing project).  So we’ve often been confronted by head-scratching features (“Why the hell did they do that?”) that need to be fixed or worked around.  It is, however, quite solid; they definitely didn’t scrimp on the wood.  So when DSL was added by the previous owners, they brought the cable through the wall very near the breaker box, which is to say as far from the guest cottages as it’s possible to be while still inside the house.  So there was no way the wi-fi could reach all the way to the cottages, and even the repeater we bought just couldn’t get a good signal through all that distance and thick, solid walls; we could get a connection, but it was weak and balky.  So we decided to buy a 100′ outdoor ethernet cable to hard-wire the repeater; it arrived Saturday morning and we wasted no time.  We moved the router to the top of the bookshelf and drilled a hole in the ceiling to run the cable into the attic, discovering in the process that the cavity between living room ceiling and attic floor is much wider than expected; it took our longest drill extension to bridge the gap.  But bridge it we did, and I pulled the cable into the attic and ran it down the length of the house…only to find that there was a wall about a meter short of where Chekhov had drilled up into the laundry room ceiling.  Perplexed, I crossed the area in the picture (you can see the ethernet cable to the right of the picture) and pressed down on that fluffy insulation, revealing a rough opening barely large enough for my petite frame, and beyond it a crawlspace whose floor now featured a freshly-drilled hole.  After that, the rest was easy; the cable went down into the laundry room, down behind the dryer, out through a new hole to the exterior, under the deck behind the hot tub, and then over to the well room (where the repeater is plugged in).  It took a bit of doing to force the stupid thing to “see” the cable instead of trying to pull the signal from the air, but we finally got it to catch, and we now appear to have decent wi-fi in the cottages.  So that means there’s now water, electricity and data to the annex; unless they invent another vital utility, I think we’re done in that department for now.